Cost
What Tear-Out and Disposal Adds
Everyone prices the new concrete. The line that actually separates two quotes is usually the one about getting the old concrete out, and it is the line most often left off.
Replacing a driveway is two jobs that get quoted as one. There is the pour, which is what everybody thinks they are buying, and before it there is demolition, loading and haulage of several tonnes of broken material. The second job is genuinely expensive, it is invisible in the finished result, and because of both of those things it is where a quote gets quietly thinned.
The published ranges
National figures from HomeGuide, read September 2026. These are not our prices and not Racine County prices:
| Item | Published national range |
|---|---|
| Removal per square foot, disposal included | $3 to $8 |
| A 10 by 10 slab | $300 to $800 |
| A concrete driveway | $1,200 to $4,500 |
Put that beside a quote for new concrete and the scale of it becomes obvious. On a replacement driveway, demolition and haulage is not a rounding item; it is a substantial share of the total, and it is entirely absent from any price you are given for a fresh pour on open ground.
Why driveways cost more to remove than patios
The same source is explicit that breaking up a driveway runs higher than plain slab demolition, and the reasons are worth understanding because they are the same reasons your own job may sit at one end of the range rather than the middle.
Thickness. A driveway is built to carry vehicles and is correspondingly deeper than the flatwork behind the house. More material per square foot means more breaking and more weight to shift.
Reinforcement. This is the big one. A slab with mesh or bar through it does not break into liftable pieces; it breaks into pieces still tied together by steel, and every one of those has to be cut or worked free. A crew can often tell within a few minutes of starting whether the day is going to run long.
What is under it. Occasionally a driveway turns out to be a driveway on top of an older driveway. It happens more than people expect, it is invisible from above, and it roughly doubles the removal that was quoted.
The items that sit inside that line
- Breaking out. Machine work where a machine can reach, hand work where it cannot, and the difference between those two is large.
- Getting it to the vehicle. A driveway is convenient. A patio behind a house, reached through a side gate, is a barrow route measured in dozens of trips.
- Haulage. Priced by weight rather than by volume, because concrete runs out of weight allowance long before it runs out of space.
- Tipping or recycling. Clean concrete is a recyclable material and mostly goes to be crushed for aggregate. Mixed or contaminated material does not, and costs more.
- Making good around the edges. Demolition disturbs the ground next to what was removed, and putting that back is part of the job rather than a favour.
Access, which moves this number more than size does
Two identical patios can be twice apart on removal cost, and the variable is almost never the concrete. It is whether a machine can get to it.
A front driveway is the easy case: a breaker works on it directly and a lorry parks alongside. A back garden reached through a narrow gate is the hard one, because every piece is handled twice, carried, and loaded from a standing position rather than tipped.
If you are getting quotes, this is the single most useful thing to walk with each contractor and point at. It also explains a gap between two prices more often than anything else on the paperwork, and a contractor who has looked at the route has already thought harder about your job than one who quoted from the street.
The local part: what happens at the road
Where a replacement reaches the right-of-way, removal stops being purely a logistics question. In Burlington a permit is required for sidewalk and driveway replacement, which means the work at that end is permitted, inspected and specified rather than left to whoever is holding the breaker.
The practical consequence for this page is scheduling rather than cost. Permitted work has a lead time attached, so the demolition of the section nearest the street cannot simply happen on the morning a crew becomes free. Our walk-through of the kerb rules sets out what that involves.
How to read it on a quote
Ask for demolition and disposal as their own line, with the assumed access written next to it. Two quotes that look far apart frequently turn out to be one quote that included removal and one that did not, and you cannot see that from the totals.
Then ask what happens if a second slab turns up underneath. A contractor who has an answer ready has met it before, and the answer you want is a stated rate rather than a shrug, because a surprise priced on the day is a surprise priced without competition.
What the new concrete costs, with assumptions stated, is in the Burlington driveway cost breakdown. If the failure is confined to a few panels rather than the whole area, concrete repair is about cutting those out against sound work instead of lifting everything.
Sources
- HomeGuide, concrete removal cost - $3 to $8 per square foot including disposal, $300 to $800 for a 10 by 10 slab, $1,200 to $4,500 for a driveway, and the note that driveway demolition runs higher than slab demolition because of size and reinforcement. Read 22 September 2026.
- City of Burlington, Wisconsin - right-of-way permit requirement covering sidewalk and driveway replacement.